May 14, 2014

It's been formally requested in our office that we institute a moratorium on #beatstweets, but I've had a note to blog this post relating Apple's redesign of iOS 7 to the structure of the fashion industry since last July. The author, Shahrzad Samadzadeh, knows her stuff and her comments are more relevant now than when the post was new.

The entire post is worth reading, and please do, but I will excerpt two points here:

To paint a simplified picture of the industry, as I know it: relatively low-priced accessories like sunglasses and wallets are often the point of entry for new relationships between customers and brands. Higher priced accessories like shoes and bags become a manifestation of a tentative commitment, and the clothes themselves are an indication of a more permanent alignment between the person and the stories and products generated by the company. To put this in technology terms: UI is sunglasses, the most accessible piece of technology is shoes and bags, and the ecosystem is clothes.

Lower-priced accessories are important to the fashion industry, and they change style constantly. With every release cycle, the new model has to be so compelling that customers volunteer to adopt it. It has to make the old style look old, and it has to get people talking. Designers, especially designers of digital products, often work towards a Platonic ideal of classic design that can stand the test of time. In fashion, there is no ideal. There are ideas of what is timeless and classic, and those ideas (think “little black dress”) are reinvented constantly.

(Seriously, please, read her entire post, even if it means you're not going to finish this one! Samadzadeh worked at a fashion company, interned at Adaptive Path and is wrapping up her Masters in interaction design from Carnegie Mellon.)

During a recent Samsung/Apple trial (I am honestly not sure which one, I don't follow this stuff as closely as I used to!), several of Apple's internal memos and presentations were revealed. One included this slide, which was obviously not meant to see the light of day:

What Apple has right now is a line-up of high end laptops, iPads and iPhones all of which exhibit what Samadzadeh references above - "classic design that can stand the test of time." It's a relatively pleasant problem, but it's a real one. The meme of "Apple is becoming a fashion company" has been percolating through tech blogs, and while (as Samadzadeh notes) "A UI is not a wallet," Apple is positioning themselves as a high growth company by taking cues from the fashion industry, so we can expect Apple's product matrix to look more like that of a fashion company than a computer company.

Beats headphones make people feel cool, Apple wants people to feel good when using their products. Making people feel cool is Apple's strongest competitive advantage, and I think it's a significant one. This is most of what the Beats deal is about, and we should expect more like it over the next few years.

Maybe the Beats deal doesn't close at all, but it's not hard to extrapolate what will happen next: Improved software and services that compliment hardware acquisitions and offer multiple points of entry for new users (especially young people) to experience Apple products. Maybe Beats will be the label on a cheaper iPhone, a wearable "iPod mini" that connects to Apple's rumored Healthbook service, or an iPad that comes with streaming media services that leave Amazon and Google in the dust.

And one more thing...

Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre will hopefully be coming to Apple, but I'm actually much more curious about the next step for Ian Rogers. He's worked at Grand Royal, which was the first record label to offer streaming media on their own web site (if memory serves, they were using an exotic format: Xing's streaming mp3 servers). He was at Nullsoft where they took the desktop mp3 player mainstream, Yahoo! where they grew the subscription streaming music market several times over, Topspin where they brought to market the first end-to-end toolkit for artists to sell music direct to their fans, and now Beats.

Have you used iTunes recently? If I want to download and play a podcast, it takes at least seven clicks. Apple has been slowing peeling away the mess of features built into what was once their flagship software (Photos to photo stream, books to iBooks, etc.) but it needs a complete reimagination. Even my biggest Apple-fan friends use rdio or Spotify; I've been roundly mocked for subscribing to iTunes Match. If Apple doesn't reboot iTunes, someone else will. And the best person in the world to do so is Ian Rogers.

Why stop at music? Earlier this year, Manton Reece wrote that Apple should acquire Beats and put the team to work on the App store as well. Each of Amazon, Google and Apple's stores betray the companies' relative priorities. Amazon has an app store where they control the pricing and cheap (or free) apps and media do well, this drives Kindle sales. Google has an app store where free ad-supported apps and media do well, and paid apps do not, and this drives ad revenue and market share. Apple sells great products, and they need to shore up their flank. As an app publisher and software developer, I love this idea too.

May 19, 2013

All of these questions are variations on "Why did Yahoo! spend one-third of their cash on hand to buy a company that by all accounts is about to run out of money?" Read this post, and hopefully these questions will not need to be asked again!

Why did Yahoo! make this acquisition?

We know very little about Marissa Mayer's big goals for Yahoo!, but we know one. She wants Yahoo! to own users' daily habits. At an analysts conference recently, she classified these as "searches on the Internet, checking finance, doing your email." Yahoo! is skating to where the puck is going to be when it comes to "daily habits." The Tumblr daily dashboard is a daily habit, and by some accounts, moreso than even Facebook or Twitter among teens.

Why is this so expensive? 1.1 Billion dollars is outrageous!

Yes it is! But per user, it's actually cheaper than, for instance, what AOL paid for the Huffington Post (AOL paid $13/user, Yahoo! is paying $5-$11, depending on what numbers you believe). Tumblr's users are much more engaged than HuffPo users were even at it's peak. Flip this around: if you were given 1.1 billion dollars, would you be able to build a service used by more than ten million people for more than an hour a month? You could not. That's a bigger audience than American Idol, or for that matter anything else (except Facebook or Twitter). Even if you had the perfect product idea and a billion dollars to build it, time is a zero sum game, and it's very hard to get people to unlearn their habits.

Isn't Yahoo! going to ruin Tumblr?

Anecdotally, I have lots of friends who have worked at Yahoo! and have some really terrible stories to tell. Just awful, unbelievable stuff. But you know what? That's true at every tech company of any scale. (BTW - EVEN TUMBLR!) Acquisitions usually don't work out, and I think that Y! probably has an unfair rep as being tough on it's acquisitions. It's not like many of the web 1.0 era of startups were successful on their own, and some (in)famously have flamed out without being acquired by Yahoo! (Dodgeball, Six Apart, etc.). I actually think that some kind of Messenger or Flickr integration with Tumblr would be awesome. Many of my smartest friends say that the fungible identities on Tumblr are part of what's most valuable about it. That's true! I doubt Marissa will mess with that. So breathe easy.

Native advertising hasn't ever been successful at scale on the web, isn't this a risk?

No. Every YouTube video is native advertising. And Yahoo! doesn't have to monetize all those crummy/porny/incoherent blogs, they only have to monetize the dashboard. And I think the basic idea that Tumblr has is the right one, they just didn't have a competent sales organization. Now they do.

How can you measure the value of a social network?

Jason Goldman suggested (perhaps jokingly) that the number of faves was a valuable metric, and unsurprisingly, I agree. Anil notes a bunch of reasons that positivity is important on the Internet, and I agree with all of them, but beyond that, a like, heart or fave (or a reblog or retweet) are the documentation of the essence of blogging. You wrote something, I liked it, and this is my way of letting you know. We're all working for free on these networks, with the exception of the currency of social approval and public appreciation. Whether by accident or design, Tumblr's system of likes and reblogs is one of the most elegant there is, and I think that's a huge part of the network's success.

Why should I care what you say?

I'm one of the few people who have been involved in the business of blogging full-time for over a decade. I have been a blogger since 1999, and tumblr user since 2007, and I actually worked with David Karp and Marco Arment on their first iteration on what would become tumblr. At the time, the engine powered Serious Eats and a handful of David's other consulting clients. These guys were not easy to work with (and, in fact, their presence on other web projects was ultimately short-lived) but they had a laser focus on what they cared about — making blogging simpler and better. I also sold my own blogging company, Apperceptive, to another blogging company, Six Apart, and participated in the sale of Six Apart to SAY media. At Six Apart's peak, our software was powering a billion (or more) pageviews a month. And if you look hard enough at what we're doing over at 29th Street Publishing, you'll see that it's basically blogging with a business model. So this is more or less what I do.

March 14, 2013

According to data from the BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of traffic for news — and a much larger one than Google+. The above chart, created by BuzzFeed's data team, represents data collected from August 2012 to today. (Yesterday, Google announced that it would close Reader in July.)

The subtext of the furor over Google Reader's shutdown is that Google no longer considers publishers its primary customers. Google folk (particularly Marissa Mayer) used to talk quite eloquently about how best way to ensure someone would return to the site was to send them away quickly. Google Plus doesn't even have an open API (yet), there is nothing you will get from Google Plus without driving into the horrendous cul-de-sac that is plus.google.com. Just last week, I was reminiscing about the fury when Google launched a toolbar update that allowed Google to offer user's features on top of the pages they were browsing. This was also the guiding philosophy of Google's unfairly-maligned OpenSocial product. These products represent a philosophy turned 180 degrees relative to Google Plus; to use google's software you never even had to navigate to Google.com.

Google's shuttering of Reader, as well as their doubling down on the dual debacles of Google Plus and Glass, represent the complete rejection of the "send them away so they will return philosophy" which was the primary reason that nerds (like me) fell in love with Google in the first place. Google is replacing a strategy that was easily understood and straightforward with one that is nearly Orwellian in scope. They're already quite far down this road, but the shuttering of Google Reader makes it clear for all to see. Google is a different company than it used to be, but the dramatic turn feels like a turn to 'evil,' and that's quite sad for me.

March 09, 2013

This actually happened in the near past, not even the near future, in either 2003 or 2004 (I don't remember which). Of course, this is when all of SxSW interactive fit in one building, the downtown conference center. The wifi networks never held up so the coveted spots in the hallway were near the ethernet ports & power plugs (a modern powerbook only had one or at best two sessions worth of power at that time, and "liveblogging" was still a thing).

Some enterprising character booted up "etherpeg" and everyone's email, flickr uploads, IMs, and blogger and Movable Type passwords were laid bare for all to see. At the time we didn't consider this a threat (remember, most XML-RPC passwords were sent over the clear, for better or for worse), and packet-sniffing was something people did when they were feeling mischievous, not because people's passwords were particularly valuable. It was an amazing few hours. To get an idea of what this looked like, here's the same software running in Bryant Park in 2005, courtesy of David Gallagher:

Brad never passed up an opportunity for a prank on this scale, and soon the network was flooded with some hardcore porn. Watching people literally jump out of their chairs when they were supposed to be paying attention to the stage is definitely one of my favorite SxSW memories. Jason and Finn helped people secure their browsing by installing stunnel and pretty soon etherpeg got less interesting.

For the last few years I've felt melancholy around SxSW time, and that picture of Finn and me and Eli's tweet got me wondering why. I realized it was mostly because I missedBrad so much, who was always the unofficial mayor of the conference. Now I've spent an hour or so looking at old Flickr pictures and blog posts, and I'm glad I've had a little time to remember him. What a great man he was.

February 25, 2013

This has long been one of my favorite slides in 29th Street Publishing's deck. Lev, not quite two, reads the New York Times' Book Review while sitting in his mother's lap. The point of the slide is that reading apps (iPad publications, iBooks, e-Readers, etc.) have a long way to go to match the user experience of paper. Reading across a line and turning the page is primal behavior. The deck is getting shorter but I wanted this slide to live on. Here it is!

Welcome!

You've reached the personal blog of David Jacobs. I live in New York City, and I'm eating two hamburgers a week on doctor's orders. When you're done with the front page, you can read the archives.
You can keep up with me elsewhere on my reblog, my vox blog, randomWalks or flickr, and last but not least, my Typepad profile.

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